Pour $25m in its coffers and the local NAS box gets it. That's backers' hope for public cloud type Nasuni

Newly funded firm competes with NetApp, other on-premises filers

Wannabe killer of on-premises NAS boxen Nasuni has just wolfed down $25m in funding to spread its message and open up new offices.

Chief technology officer Andres Rodriguez said of his firm's business: "It's a very financially driven model and required a lot more money than we expected."

The storage company's pitch is that a fast access local cache with public cloud back-end object storage can provide local NAS access speed, the immense scalability that local boxes can't deliver, as well as cloud economics.

On-premises NAS systems and their allied backup and disaster recovery infrastructure can be replaced by running a slim virtual Nasuni agent on-premises, which talks to cloud-native Nasuni UniFS software running in a public cloud which stores files in the cloud provider's object storage with immutable versioning.

Low-latency file access is provided by caching data in the virtual appliances on-premises. The 11-year-old firm has claimed customers can get a 99.3 per cent hit rate from the local cache because its predictive algorithms for data accesses can pre-populate the caches.

Nasuni synchronises file contents between distant edge appliances for collaboration and disaster recovery is provided by hosting a copy of the data in a separate cloud region.

The company has inhaled seven rounds of funding, totalling $154m, since it was started up in 2008. The latest round was led by Australia's Telstra Corp, with existing investors taking part. Nasuni will probably open an Oz office as a result.

CTO Rodriguez said: "Many of our customers run Nutanix, SimpliVity and HyperFlex hyperconverged systems. They're great platforms on which to run Nasuni Edge appliances."

The roadmap for Nasuni's multi-cloud NAS-as-a-Service has a focus on ensuring the edge appliances run well with vSphere, KVM and Nutanix's AHV hypervisor. It also includes cross-cloud data insights.

Nasuni hopes to win business from the usual on-premises NAS box suspects – and NetApp will be at the top of that list. ®